As technologies advance, a transmission rate of the Ethernet has risen from 10 M, 100 M, 1 G and 10 G to 40 G and 100 G Currently, the 40 G and 100 G Ethernets have been widely used. With rapid development of new services such as IP (Internet Protocol, Internet Protocol) video and cloud calculating, service traffic on a network grows rapidly and a requirement of the services for a high bandwidth becomes urgent, which drive the Ethernet to evolve to a higher rate.
To make the Ethernet evolve to a higher rate, the Ethernet develops in the direction of higher order modulation and a PIC (Photonic Integrated Circuit, photonic integrated circuit) in the prior art. By using a higher order modulation scheme, a communication rate of a single channel can be improved.
However, the prior art has at least the following disadvantage: as the rate of the Ethernet is gradually increased, when data is processed by using an existing physical layer architecture of the Ethernet, bit width processing is usually performed, which increases the complexity of data processing. In addition, the number of used virtual channels grows rapidly as the rate of the Ethernet is increased, which further increases the complexity of data processing.